Newjack (13 page)

On the way to B-block we passed 5-Building, a small cellblock (housing 272 inmates) with floors devoted to distinct groups: recent arrivals to Sing Sing, including transfers and absconders (former inmates captured after parole violations); mess-hall workers; and inmates with mental health problems. We saw the laundry, one of the few freestanding buildings in the maximum-security section, and the mess hall, with its busy nexus—“Times Square”—which sat right in the middle of the dining rooms for A-block, B-block, and 5-Building. The chapel building, opposite B-block, was used mainly to show movies, but it had churchlike worship spaces for Catholics and Protestants and areas in its basement for Muslims, Jews, and Quakers.

Sing Sing’s maze of corridors, gates, and staircases had grown organically over the years according to the demands of the particular era; no master plan had guided the development. Looking out
from some high windows, you could see a dozen red-brick walls facing different directions and the roofs of the many connecting corridors. Some of the beautiful slate shingles of these roofs were missing, and decaying soffits hung down from them, too. There seemed to be a score of little courtyards, half of them abandoned and overgrown. The whole area was dotted with small sheds, and the buildings themselves had a mishmash of additions. The gyms of A-block and B-block, for example, had been oddly appended years after the original construction. The interior of most corridors was painted brick and cinder block. No one could memorize this layout in a day—perhaps not even in a week—and yet we weren’t allowed to bring our maps inside; they were thought to be a security risk. Still, we didn’t need them to wonder what had happened to 6-Building or 3-Building or 4-building, the gaps in the number sequence, buildings perhaps constructed but then abandoned or renamed.

The most startling corridor—my favorite, actually—was the long, semi-open one connecting the max facility to the school building and Tappan, across the railroad tracks. The walls of this corridor were a series of barred arches, through which rain and icy winds blew in bad weather. With its peeling, chipped paint and water stains, the interior had the air of a colonial ruin. Past the school gate, the corridor was fully enclosed and, for reasons I still do not understand, partially unlit. At one staircase, if it was bright outside, the contrast with the gloomy tunnel dazzled you so much that it was hard to see the steps; you had to feel your way down with your toes. Set into the wall by these stairs was an old, rusted gate, and an inmate would later ask me if that was where the Death House used to be. Certainly it looked like it.

But it wasn’t. The Death House, 15-Building, was an old brick structure down by the river. It had been converted, following the abolition of the death penalty in New York State, to a vocational building with modest print, drafting, woodworking, welding, and small-engine shops. Old Sparky, the electric chair, had been removed to a museum in Virginia; Death Row, converted into an orientation classroom. Six hundred and fourteen people (including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of selling atomic-bomb secrets to the Russians) had been executed here, but there were no plaques; the only links to the past were the memories of officers like the one who showed us where the chair had been, and the switch, and the so-called Dance Hall—I thought I recognized it
from a James Cagney movie—through which condemned inmates passed on their way to the chair.

Tappan had a much different feel from the Sing Sing max. Its three-story cinder-block buildings had large, open dorm rooms, containing up to seventy-five inmates each. The dorms were divided by waist-high partitions into single or double cubicles. There was freedom of movement within the dorms except during the three daily counts; inmates washed their own clothes and could cook their own meals, and there were television rooms. A single officer sat near the entrance to each room at a large desk, and it was a sought-after job, for though some of the inmates had committed crimes of the same violence as inmates “up the hill,” they were in the last five years of their sentences, tended to be older, and were often on track for parole. Tappan had its violent incidents, but much less often than the max facility.

Outside the three dorm buildings was a large gym, built by Warner Bros. as thanks for use of the Death House and other prison sites in its gangster movies of the 1930s. And outside the gym were a weight-lifting area and a lawn, tended by inmates who, on warm days, reclined there.

We’d been up the hill and had come back down. Before we climbed back up to the main gate, we were given a closer glimpse of the fence that substituted for a wall along the riverfront and on either side of the sunken railway corridor. It was a double fence, actually—two high chain-link barriers topped with spirals of gleaming razor ribbon and a kind of no-man’s-land in the eight or nine feet of ground between them. In this zone, infrared sensors checked for movement, with strands of taut wire and electromagnetic green wire providing redundant protection. It was the sort of thing squirrels and birds could wreak havoc on, our guide said, which was one reason for the system of zoomable, rotatable cameras mounted along the top, which were monitored in the arsenal. The entire system had cost about $12 million, he said. As we showed our I.D.s to leave the prison—a safeguard against inmates walking out the front door—I decided that if I were an escaping inmate, I’d stay away from the fence.

As we walked back to the QWL building, we spoke among ourselves of how run-down Sing Sing was. But in the debriefing by Lieutenant Wilkin, the focus was on how chaotic it was, how so many of the rules weren’t respected. Several times, by now, we had been quizzed by the training staff on the contents of the
Inmate
Guidelines
booklet. There were ninety-nine guidelines, all of which we had to memorize, governing the minutiae of inmate life. For example:

31. You will be allowed to carry a maximum of two (2) packs of cigarettes on your person. Only a maximum of six (6) cartons of cigarettes will be allowed to be stored in cells/cubes. [An inmate in possession of more than this was likely a “mule,” collecting or paying off some illicit debt.]

36. Visibility into the cell … must not be obstructed by … furniture, clotheslines, clothes, bedding, or towels.

24. Pictures, photographs, newspaper clippings, and one small national flag (10″ × 12″) … are to be … taped or fastened at the top only on the cell wall in the [designated] 2′ × 4′ area. Other symbols not authorized will be confiscated.

25. Display of pictures or photographs of nudes will only be placed where they cannot be seen from outside the cell or cubicle (above cell door, or inside locker).

Metal hangers weren’t allowed. Music could be played only through headphones, not speakers. Beds had to be made before inmates left their cells.

But we told the lieutenant we’d seen many of the rules broken: sheets hanging from the bars, hard-porn girlie shots staring us in the face, music blaring from radios, a dozen cigarette cartons lurking under a table. What was the deal?

The lieutenant gave a little smile. “As I said, this is a training facility. Not everything is exactly as it should be. We’ll need your help to make it that way. In fact, we’ll demand it: Your job is to enforce the rules.” The lieutenant was a man stuck in that kind of bureaucratic crack where you have to pay lip service to the way things should be yet at the same time acknowledge the reality or appear to be an out-of-touch fool. I just wondered if they were really planning to make
us
enforce the rules when nobody else did.

One of the female officers then asked an eminently sensible question: “But are we supposed to talk to them?”

The lieutenant didn’t get the question. He apparently didn’t know that in the Academy, we had been ordered not to talk to the inmates around us. But the idea of not talking to them here was so preposterous to him that he had a hard time grasping the concept.

“Of course you have to talk to them!” he finally said. “You’d better talk to them. How else are you going to let them know what to do and hear what they need from you? Oh, yes! The job is all
about
talking to them. That’s really what it’s about.”

That echoed what Sergeant Bloom, head of the Academy, had told us. And yet it seemed to be a point of pride among Bloom’s instructors that the training was about
us
, not about
them
. We’d been taught that worrying about inmates’ concerns was tantamount to pandering, that it almost demeaned an officer. Let
them
worry about how to communicate with
us
was the more common attitude.

As we walked out to the cars, the Antonelli brothers were muttering that others might not enforce the rules (the wimps!), but they sure as hell were going to. We passed under one of the watch-towers along the river, and someone noticed a familiar face—a recruit from the class ahead of ours, the guy who had taught us to short-sheet our beds.

“Hey, how’d you get that job?” someone asked him as we all craned our necks skyward.

“I think it’s because I was the high scorer on the range in my section,” the man answered. (I’d later learn that this was highly unlikely; Sergeant Holmes was oblivious of our scores.)

We told him how chaotic it seemed to us inside the prison. “Any trouble getting them to do what you say?” asked a recruit.

“I just swear at ’em,” he replied. “It’s the fastest way to get the job done.”

The following Monday morning, we began training inside the prison. I threaded my baton through its ring on my belt, trying to imagine a scenario in which I might have to wield it. Before joining regular officers in the lineup room, our group had a separate lineup at which we received our assignments. Mine was the floor of B-block containing galleries R and W, and I was to assist the officer on duty there.

On our long hike up the stairs, minutes behind the regular officers, few of us had anything to say. We trainees were strangers here. Our heads were filled with rules and anecdotes, but we lacked any real knowledge of how to perform the job that was ours as of today. Now separated, we would each face our fear alone. Our main problem, it seemed to me, was that the state had
certified us as lion tamers before ever leaving us alone in a cage with a lion.

Our group got smaller the farther into the prison we went, with groups breaking off at the hospital building and at every side corridor. One particularly large contingent exited at A-block. The dozen of us remaining strode off down the dark hallway to B-block, listening to the sound of our shoes hitting the concrete floor.

Like A-block, its fraternal twin, B-block was a massive structure. We clustered near the gate like a small herd of doomed sheep, looking at the galleries above. Inmates who were out of their cells on the galleries gazed back down on us.
OJTs
, we heard ourselves called again and again, and
newjacks
. Officers around us were smoking, though nobody was supposed to. We heard gates slamming, music playing, men yelling, and showers running as though B-block were one immense locker room.

We stood on the flats, ground-floor corridors that encircle the tiers of cells. The cells are arranged with two galleries, or rows, back to back on each tier. From top to ground level, they are:

U and Z
T and Y
S and X
R and W
Q and V

The Q-and-V galleries are on the flats. The Q-R-S-T-U galleries comprise the “front side,” or river side, of B-block; V-W-X-Y-Z, the back. B-block’s letters were what was left of the alphabet after the galleries had been named in 5-Building (A, B, C, D), 7-Building (E, F, G), and A-block (H, J, K, L, M, N, O, P). The anonymity of it all was telling, I thought. Every other public building in the country was eagerly associated with the glory of a leader or, in recent years, a corporation: the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Houston’s Hobby Airport, 3Com Park, Coors Field. But there was no Microsoft Men’s Correctional Facility, say, and no Reagan Center for Juvenile Detention. Prisons were usually named after places; their buildings, after letters of the alphabet.

The officer in charge (OIC) appeared, warned us not to let out any keeplocks, and then ordered us up the center staircase to our assignments. To get to the top, we had to pass through a locked
staircase gate on every single floor. R-and-W was just one floor up, but it took a long time to get there. “R-and-W, center gate!” we yelled again and again. Through the mesh we could see a lot of inmates milling around, apparently arriving on the gallery via some other entrance. Finally, a gray uniform appeared among them, and an officer in his early thirties plodded up, stuck a key in the gate, and pulled it aside. We passed through, my fellow trainees quickly disappearing up the next staircase. I held out my hand. “Conover,” I said. “Here to help you today.”

“Okay, here’s your keys,” said the officer, passing to me two of the four heavy rings on his belt. His name tag identified him as Fay. “And here’s the keeplocks.” He dug in his shirt pocket for a scrap of paper with the numbers of a dozen cells on R and as many more on W. As I began to copy them down, he said of the regular inmates, “They’re just coming back from chow.”